Lore in my wife’s family says that her mother, a beautiful Jewish immigrant fleeing grief in the Ukraine about a century ago, ran into someone named Carl Laemmle on a ship crossing the Atlantic. As the story goes, Laemmle asked her to check in with his still-young Universal film company, as she might have a future in the movies.
Once in the United States, friends and relatives advised the young woman against it. This was probably a white slavery racket, they warned. Maybe they’d been watching pictures like Traffic In Souls, Universal’s first full-length feature, which in 1913 dramatized the trade in immigrant girls who were routed from Ellis Island to the bordellos.
At any rate, my late mother-in-law took a pass. And when I once described the episode to Lew Wasserman, then chief executive of Universal’s McA Inc. parent corporation, he said: “Too bad. You could have been one of us.
Once in the United States, friends and relatives advised the young woman against it. This was probably a white slavery racket, they warned. Maybe they’d been watching pictures like Traffic In Souls, Universal’s first full-length feature, which in 1913 dramatized the trade in immigrant girls who were routed from Ellis Island to the bordellos.
At any rate, my late mother-in-law took a pass. And when I once described the episode to Lew Wasserman, then chief executive of Universal’s McA Inc. parent corporation, he said: “Too bad. You could have been one of us.
- 4/17/2019
- by Michael Cieply
- Deadline Film + TV
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